The Republican Party Has Flat Out Lost Its Mind

[jackd]

And where was the Democratic Party? It should have learned from the NYT coverage of Hillary's campaign that the paper can't be relied upon.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 19, 2022 17:47:41 GMT jackd said:

And where was the Democratic Party? It should have learned from the NYT coverage of Hillary's campaign that the paper can't be relied upon.

I do wonder about the lack of opposition research.  I'm speculating that they thought this was a blue district and there was little danger this guy would get elected.  

[goldenvalley]

Tim Miller at Bulwark reports on his experiences at a MAGA gathering in Phoenix over the weekend. It was put on by Turning Point USA and they gave their party a cute name.  If you like sarcasm in rich language read the whole thing.  Miller is good at this style.

The midterm elections put a kink in AMERICAFEST’s party planning. A coronation was not on offer. There was nary a liberal tear to be sipped. So as I arrived in the valley of the sun on Saturday afternoon, what I was most curious to find out was how these right-wing political stars would grapple with that failure.

The answer? They didn’t.

AmFest navigated their electoral shellacking with neither weeping nor gnashing of teeth, but by undertaking a metamorphosis from political conference to tent revival for a GenZ God Squad that needed to be lifted up after a Fall of fails.

Instead of reflecting upon what they might have done to bring about such an unexpected, ahistorical midterm face-plant—and strategizing on how they might change course next cycle—the MAGA movement’s leaders cloaked the audience in a warm blanket of their existential rightness amidst a world gone mad.

As the conference’s chief memelord, Benny Johnson, told me Monday morning: A stage with “pyrotechnics” is not the place for boring lamentations or lessons from the types of candidates who performed better. “A guy like Mike DeWine would have a heart attack up there with all that firepower” he said, before imploring me to include that line in my dispatch (Note: Mike Dewine won by 25.6 points. Blake Masters lost by 5.)

Most of the speeches reflected Benny’s proposed rhetorical posture: ignoring the midterms beyond vague acknowledgments that some attendees might be dispirited while focusing instead on three main categories of material:

(1) Megachurch-style Ted Talks about how woke ideology has turned America into a fallen Sodom and Gomorrah that requires missionaries in an existential battle against evil itself.

(2) Celebrating the areas in society where they believe conservatives are ascendant, such as comedy.

(3) Harangues against the election thieves, particularly the host county’s municipal officials.

re Kari Lake:

Her big reveal was to tell the audience that she is taking the Arizona election challenge all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. This was received with whooping and thundering applause. (Meanwhile here on earth, a lower court judge sanctioned Lake’s legal team for “furthering false narratives” and the morning after her speech 8 out of the campaign’s 10 legal claims were dismissed outright).

At a hotel bar after the speech, Lake’s team assured me that her hallucinatory claims about the “steal” are in fact genuine, which I find preposterous. But whether or not Kari Lake really believes her own nonsense is neither here nor there. What matters is that the performance she put on was convincing enough to win over many of the assembled. Many of those I spoke to told me that they believed she was robbed. The cheers for her attacks on Maricopa County election officials were raucous and she was mobbed by admirers in the VIP section of the Project Veritas after-party. I did encounter one glimmer of sanity in the form of a student who told me he thought she lost and this was all part of a PR strategy to ingratiate herself with Trump. (I am concerned that this astute young man has a one-way ticket to Cucktown!)

Like many other speakers, Lake infused her delusions with Christian Nationalist bromides. The former kabbalah practitioner declared that “We are Americans and we bow to one king. That is our creator, God.” She went on, “We gotta bring back God, guys. I wanna bring someone else back too. I think you know who I’m talking about. Donald J. Trump.”

And Tucker Carlson was there:

Tucker shared that after the results came in he needed some time to “marinate in my shame” so he took a few days off from the Fox to go on a pheasant hunting pilgrimage in an effort to find the beginnings of clarity. “And here is what I concluded,” he declared.

Naturally, this verbal queue made me get the typing fingers ready, prepared to take down what the leading MAGA infotainment purveyor thought the lessons were from the American people’s third straight rejection of his worldview.

But what came next was less a conclusion about the election and more a metaphysical stream of ruminations babbling down a mountain, around a few bends, and over the heads of those who came for a political rally. If I had to stitch it on a pillow, his theme was accepting humility and even helplessness when it comes to elections and instead turning to God and summoning the strength to grow in the face of suffering.

Carlson said he even surprised himself with this suggestion, being that he was, up until two years ago an Episcopalian, a religious sect that he repeatedly ridiculed as pagan over the course of the speech. But he had come to believe that giving oneself over to the omnipotent eternal was the only answer given the ruling Democrats’ being rewarded at the ballot box despite their (supposed) rejection of god, truth, and beauty.

[LFC]

And the utterly clueless, self-owning tweet of the day award goes to...

One response shoved this up their nose.

Biden2020Rep
@samcarr40408258

10 highest poverty rates in the US ?

- GOP controlled

Look in the mirror

[LFC]

McCarthy is hurling red meat promises to the MAGAt holdouts in a desperate bid to get the Speakership. He needs almost every one that is currently a holdout. Makes me wonder what he promised MTG in a backroom deal.

Five conservative members — Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) and Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) — have publicly said they will not support McCarthy’s speakership bid, and other members seem sympathetic to their cause. The “Never Kevin” Republicans even announced they plan to vote as a unit. This could tank McCarthy’s speakership ambitions by eating up the slim majority House Republicans have in the upcoming Congress. If McCarthy loses more than four Republican votes in the election scheduled for January 3, he’ll likely fall under the 218 votes he needs to become the new House leader.

Here's another vote he might lose because the Rep is a fraud.

The tight margin for victory has led McCarthy to contort himself with the counterintuitive promises and in other novel ways. Semafor reported, for example, that he may be forced to embrace Congressman-elect George Santos (R-NY) following the explosive New York Times revelations that Santos seemingly lied about almost every single aspect of his resume and credentials.

McCarthy has still not weighed in on the Santos allegations. Pressuring Santos to resign could mean a special election that could help Democrats gain another seat. That would not only mean an even more slim majority for Republicans in next year’s Congress, but one less vote for McCarthy’s speakership.

Santos, though ostensibly MAGA-aligned in other respects (the rep.-elect was in D.C. on Jan. 6) pointedly renewed his support for McCarthy’s speakership bid on Twitter just before the New York Times story came out.

[LFC]

Uuuuhhh, a lot of us are totally OK with that.

I don't know how accurate this is but it wouldn't shock me in the least.

[LFC]

Things that make you go, "Hmmmm."

The Peasant Observer
@peoplespeasant

I'm half expecting news to come out that George Santos wasn't even a real person but is 4 racoons in a human suit.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 22, 2022 18:31:41 GMT LFC said:

Things that make you go, "Hmmmm."

The Peasant Observer
@peoplespeasant

I'm half expecting news to come out that George Santos wasn't even a real person but is 4 racoons in a human suit.

It does seem like it was an own the libs thing...young gay male Jewish, Latino but a Republican!  Sort of what was done with Hershel Walker but Walker was an actual person.

[LFC]

The ballad of George Santos gets more and more bizarre. The supposedly gay man divorced a woman right before he announced that he was running for office.

Yesterday I joked — well, maybe half-joked? — that with all we’ve learned about Rep.-Elect George Santos, is he even gay? Being an “openly gay” Latino Republican has been a central part of his campaign pitch. He doesn’t fit the mold of a Trumper and that, he argues, “scares the left.” Now, it’s a fairly complicated and inevitably subjective and personal matter whether someone is gay or straight. But The Daily Beast managed to dig up the fact that until just two weeks prior to announcing his run for office he was married to a woman.

As the Beast piece rightly notes, people get married for lots of reasons. And people’s identities aren’t entirely bound up in state marriages. But it gets a little more complicated on this front for Santos. He’s never disclosed or discussed his previous opposite-sex marriage — which on its own he’s really not under any obligation to do. But a central part of his campaign is his claim that he’s a lifelong Republican and he’s never experienced any discrimination in the party as an openly gay man for more than a decade.

There’s at least some tension between that claim and the fact that he was at least legally married to a woman until two weeks before launching his campaign.

[LFC]

Both larger media outlets and the Dems missed a massive number of red flags on George Santos. Local reporting didn't.

But Paybarah also flagged reporting in The North Shore Leader. That’s the local paper for the district, which is made up of a string of fairly affluent bedroom communities on the west side of the North Shore of Long Island. I was gobsmacked to see their editorial endorsing Zimmerman. They start by saying “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican for U.S. Congress in NY-3. But the GOP nominee — George Santos — is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot.” (I guess it’s a GOP-leaning ed board but everyone’s got their limits.) They then go on to regale us with Santos’ various lies and nonsense, his non-existent “mansions,” his role in the Ponzi scheme, all sorts of questions about his finances. They openly question whether he actually loaned $600,000 to his campaign as he claimed. They didn’t have the fake jobs and college degree. But they knew about a ton.

The mansions thing is a new one to me. He claimed to own mansions in the Hamptons and in Oyster Bay. The paper checked and they were owned by other people.

Then there’s this article from a few days earlier which is where they first reported the mansion bamboozlement. They also caught the fact that his $600,000 loan to his campaign, which he disclosed on his FEC disclosure and discussed publicly, didn’t show up somehow on his 2022 personal financial disclosure. They’ve been pressing for a while that they don’t think he ever loaned the campaign that money. There’s more. But you get the idea.

The local paper has been reporting on his various lies, fake claims of wealth and even saying he may be a flight risk (he claims to be a dual citizen) if he’s charged with a crime over falsifying federal records. Very reasonably they now have a lengthy article of the “We told you so” variety in which they say, hey, don’t blame us! We were telling you this dude was a crook and bringing the receipts long before the election. And they make a pretty good case. Before the election they called him “a Fabulist — a Fake…” who makes “fantasy claims and lies to everyone.” As the Leader puts it, rather than the high flying financier he claims to be, “Santos is really just a petty criminal from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil [where he is currently wanted] on criminal charges of committing elder fraud and check forgery.”

[LFC]

Santos may be facing a world of hurt.

The New York Attorney General’s Office said it is “looking into a number of issues" surrounding Congressman-elect George Santos, who was the subject of a bombshell New York Times investigation that questions whether the incoming Republican lawmaker fabricated much of his biography, including his education, work history and financial dealings.

The office, however, did not confirm whether it had opened an official investigation into Santos and declined to comment further on the matter.

A lawyer for Santos, Joe Murray, told NBC News in an email Thursday afternoon that he had "not been contacted by anyone" from the New York Attorney General's Office.

"I have nothing further to add at this time," he said.

[LFC]

More on Santos's manufactured biography. This clown is a complete conman. No wonder he ran as a Republican.

Congressman-elect George Santos’ emotional narrative of having Jewish grandparents who fled Europe during World War II appears to be untrue, like much of the rest of his campaign biography, according to genealogy websites reviewed by the Forward.

Santos, a Long Island Republican, has said that his father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish, and that both faiths “are mine.” The very first line of the “About George” page on his campaign website states: “George’s grandparents fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”

But the website myheritage.com lists Santos’ maternal grandparents as having both been born in Brazil before the Nazis rose to power — his grandfather, Paulo Horta Devolder, in 1918, and his grandmother, Rosalina Caruso Horta Devolder, in Rio, in 1927. An online obituary for Santos’ mother, Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder, who died in 2016, says she was born in Niterói, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, on Dec. 22, 1962, to Paul and Rosalina Devolder.

Fatima’s own Facebook page, which has photos of her with Santos and tags his page, has no mentions of the words “Jew” or “Jewish,” nor the terms Yom Kippur, Shabbat or Israel in English or Portuguese. But four of the seven pages she “liked” were for Catholic groups, and another was for a Brazilian priest and singer.

She regularly shared posts with Catholic themes and images of Jesus, including one eight months before her death from a Brazilian Christian group, Tarde com Maria (Afternoons with Maria), that says in Portuguese: “The cross of Christ for some is a symbol of defeat, for us it is a symbol of salvation.” Another adapts a quote from Genesis, “There’s an angel today, delivering from all evil.”

[LFC]

And once again the post "At this point I think George Santos might actually just be 4 raccoons in a human suit" appears closer to the truth.

[LFC]

Geez, the George Santos stories just keep on coming.

Newly elected U.S. congressman and alleged fabulist George Santos (R-NY) may have fabricated much of his resume while running for office, but his former co-workers say the tall tales and rabid social climbing didn’t necessarily start there.

Santos described himself while campaigning as an experienced banker who worked his way up the ladder at a few major industry firms—including Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, which have both said they have no record of his employment. However, local New York publication Patch traced his employment history to at least one former job: customer service representative at Dish Network.

He held the job at a Queens call center for at least eight months, from 2011-2012, and served as a bilingual employee who spoke Portuguese, a company representative confirmed to the outlet.

A number of his former colleagues described to Patch several notable biographical stories—the fact that he was born in Brazil and traveled there often, that he “came from money,” and that he used several different names: Anthony Devolder, George Devolder, and George Anthony Devolder Santos. He also apparently founded and was constantly fundraising for an animal rescue charity that never “made sense” to at least one co-worker who remained Facebook friends with Santos for years after he left Dish, named Barbara Hurdas.

A Catholic priest from Queens also claimed that his family attended Mass sporadically at his church and that they were all Christian—blowing a hole through Santos’ repeated claims that he is Jewish.

In fact, the clergyman told CBS that Santos approached him following the death of his mother, Fatima Devolder, for fundraising help because the family could not afford a proper funeral for her. The congregation ultimately held a memorial service for her that included a collection.

Got that? He came from money but had to beg for money for his mother's funeral. Oh, yeah. I also read elsewhere that he put up a GoFundme campaign for her funeral back in 2016 and it's still active.

[LFC]

More Santos insanity.

Rep.-elect George Santos’ “family firm” that supposedly managed $80 million in assets was initially registered at a gynecologist’s office in a Florida office park. 

That is one of many curious details about Santos’ business dealings that TPM uncovered during an in-depth analysis this week. Santos, a New York Republican who is set to take office next month, has had aspects of his professional resume and personal biography called into question by a series of reports, including an exposé in the New York Times. Local news outlets have also been all over the sketchiness in Santos’ background for months. 

Santos and several of his colleagues have ties to an alleged multimillion-dollar “ponzi scheme” and a complex network of companies. Among his associates, we found a businessman who claims to have the secrets to earning massive sums with a few keyboard clicks, a shady CEO who allegedly stole money to pay off seven-figure credit card bills, and the body armor wearing, QAnon slogan spouting “Spartan warrior” who ran against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in this year’s election. 

Two of the firms linked to Santos and his associates are supposed strategy firms that have earned money from Republican congressional campaigns. One took in over $110,000 from the unsuccessful challenge to Ocasio-Cortez. The other did work for a candidate who claims to have never heard of the business.  

It’s a dizzyingly complex paper trail that reveals a network of companies operated out of a condo and the gynecological practice in Florida. At the center of it all is Santos’ supposed “family” firm, which, he’s suggested in financial disclosures, helped him earn a massive raise in recent years just as he poured money into his own run for Congress.

Some of the prior reporting on Santos by both Mother Jones and The Daily Beast delved into his business ties. However, our research has unearthed a slew of new details. Santos and his attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story. 

[LFC]

Santos gave the classic non-apology, soft pedaled just how outrageous and abundant his lies were, and vowed to go to Congress.

[Ed.Note: A couple hours after initial publication The New York Post put up a substantially expanded version of this interview article, along with a more skeptical and charged slant. That subsequent version included questions I said were left out in this post. -jm]

Embattled weasel George Santos has given what amounts to a softball/clean bill of health interview to The New York Post. It wouldn’t be right to say the piece ignores the scandals surrounding Santos. They basically ask and give him the opportunity to admit he lied about various stuff. But the editors do as much as they can to soften the edges of Santos’s comically gagged tale.

He says he “never worked directly” for Goldman or Citi. Claiming he did was a “poor choice of words.” He says a company he worked for did business with Goldman and Citi. On graduating from Baruch College he admits he never graduated from any college. “I didn’t graduate from any institution of higher learning. I’m embarrassed and sorry for having embellished my resume. I own up to that … We do stupid things in life.”

That’s about the gist of the interview. They didn’t ask him about his disclosure forms, the fact that he is a fugitive from justice in Brazil, real questions about potential marriage/immigration fraud or proof that he’s a U.S. citizen. The most salient point is that Santos says he’s ready to move on from questions about his resume and get started serving in Congress. In other words, he’s put the story behind him, according to him.

But there’s one other weird part of the Post story. The Post claims that it was a “running joke” within the GOP House leadership that Santos was a pathological liar with a made up resume.

Senior House Republicans were apparently aware of the inaccuracies and embellishments in the rep-elect’s resume, and the topic became a “running joke,” multiple insiders close to House GOP leadership told The Post over the weekend.

“As far as questions about George in general, that was always something that was brought up whenever we talked about this race,” said one senior GOP leadership aide. “It was a running joke at a certain point. This is the second time he’s run and these issues we assumed would be worked out by the voters.”

If this is true, it’s certainly not a great look for McCarthy and the rest of the House leadership. But it’s not clear to me why they would be sharing this with the Post.

More to come.

The silence from Republicans is, of course, deafening since it's clear they were in on it. He's a perfect fit for the GOP, a fact free grifter. I'm sure he'll be a good little poodle and do exactly what he's told.

[LFC]

Outside of an actual crime there's nothing that stops serial liar George Santos from taking his House seat. There is, however, evidence of and a lot of open questions about actual crime. He may not even be a legitimate U.S. citizen.

WaPo has a solid rundown of the state of the Santos story after last night’s interview in The New York Post and another live interview Santos did last night. I want to give you a quick assessment of where this story likely goes next, what matters and what does not. On the endless list of fabrications in Santos’s resume and biography, his response has essentially been “LOL, whatever.” Yeah, I lied. Sorry. But who cares?

Narrowly speaking, he’s right. There’s no law that says you have to be honest with voters about your background or almost anything else. There’s no federal recall. The recourse to this behavior is either at the ballot box in two years or in the hands of his colleagues in the House who could expel him from the body. But expulsion is extremely rare. Only five members of the House have ever been expelled and three of those were tied to secession in 1861. In essence, it’s happened twice in U.S. history. It’s slightly more common for the House to refuse to seat a new member.

Absent getting shamed out of office for being an inveterate liar and weasel, the issue will come down to potential criminal conduct. So let’s run down the most likely points of vulnerability on that front.

[LFC]

Well this didn't age well!

Eh, Catholic / Jewish, it's all the same, right?

[LFC]

Two words about George Santos's campaign funding: "Russian money." Anybody surprised?

THREAD: for those asking where liar George Santos got the money to run a campaign, a sizable portion of it came from a man named Intrater. That name will sound familiar to folks who listened to the OG Mueller, She Wrote podcast. 1/

Intrater’s cousin is a guy named Vekselberg, who pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into Michael Cohen’s “Essential Consulting” from a company called Columbus Nova, and the two traded hundreds of phone calls and text messages. 2/

Intrater, Vekselberg, and Cohen attended the Trump inauguration together. Intrater paid $250K to the trump inaugural. In April of this year, the DoJ accused Vekselberg of fraud and money laundering and seized is $90M yacht. 3/

In 1996, Vekselberg partnered with another oligarch named Blavatnik to go in on Rusal - an aluminum company owned by Oleg Deripaska - who funneled nearly $4M into GOP coffers including McConnell’s. McConnell tried to cut a deal to build an aluminum plant in KY with their help. 4/

McConnell lobbied to lift sanctions on Deripaska so he could help fund the project. All of these guys were sanctioned for interference in the 2016 election, by the way. 5/

And Mnuchin, who protected trump from mandatory presidential tax audits, was a partner with Blavatnik in his movie production company. He sold his shares to Blavatnik when he was nominated as Treasury Secretary, and Blavatnik funneled $1M into Donald’s inaugural. 6/

So no one in my house is surprised that a straw candidate was partly funded by sanctioned Russian oligarchs tied to trump. END/ (sources to follow)

Source
www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/10/council-on-foreign-relations-leonard-blavatnik-russia/

Source
www.thedailybeast.com/republican-george-devolder-santos-got-cash-from-andrew-intrater-cousin-of-russian-oligarch-viktor-vekselberg

Source
www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/us/politics/michael-cohen-andrew-intrater.html

[andydp]

Dec 27, 2022 17:11:58 GMT LFC said:

Well this didn't age well!

Eh, Catholic / Jewish, it's all the same, right?

An article I read quoted him as saying he was Jewish.  I wonder if he knows the meaning of schmendrik and putz ?

Found it !!

[andydp]

Just posing a rhetorical question:

Would the GOP be so quiet if Santos had a "D" after his name ?

[LFC]

Dec 28, 2022 15:56:10 GMT andydp said:

Just posing a rhetorical question:

Would the GOP be so quiet if Santos had a "D" after his name ?

On a related note, as far as I can remember the last person the Republicans stood up and loudly denounced was Steve "When did white supremacy become a bad thing?" King (R-IAm a Racist Asshole). They finally turned on Madison Cawthorn when he started making wild accusations about them but they torpedoed him very quietly in the primary. And of course they're still running defense for MTG, Bimboebert, Gaetz, Biggs, and on and on.

[LFC]

Santos is such a stooge that he fell flat on his face on Faux News with Tulsi "I Was Never A Democrat and Was/Still Am On Putin's Payroll" Gabbard.

Republican congressman-elect George Santos tried to explain away a number of lies about his professional and personal life during a Fox News interview with Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday—but the network rookie and former Democrat refused to let him off the hook.

Gabbard, as guest host of Tucker Carlson Tonight, sounded wholly unsympathetic after Santos admitted to making “a mistake.”

“Humans are flawed and we all make mistakes,” he added.

“If I were one of those in New York’s 3rd District right now,” Gabbard said, “and I’m finding out all of these lies that you’ve told — not just one little lie or one little embellishment. These are blatant lies. My question is: Do you have no shame? Do you have no shame [regarding] the people you are asking to trust you to be their voice for them, their families and kids in Washington?”

“I can say the same thing about the Democrats and [that] party,” Santos replied. “Joe Biden has been lying to the American people for forty years. He is the president of the United States. Democrats resoundingly support him. Do they have no shame?”

“This is not about the Democratic Party, though,” responded Gabbard, whose employer originally didn’t bring much attention to Santos’ fabrications before landing Tuesday’s interview. She later asked Santos whether anything he says from now on should be trusted.

“Look, I agree with what you are saying. And as I stated, and I continue: We can debate my resume and how I worked with firms such as Goldman [Sachs] and Citigroup.”

“Is it debatable or is it just false?” Gabbard pressed.

[LFC]

When the only one defending you is MTG you know you're a f***ing loser ... just like her.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) wants Republicans to give GOP congressman-elect George Santos the benefit of the doubt after he was caught telling a string of lies about his professional and personal life—because he might still be “sincere,” she says. In a Tuesday evening Twitter thread, Greene bizarrely came to Santos’ defense after he gave a painful-to-watch interview to Fox News trying to explain away all his lies. Greene, apparently swayed by Santos’ flimsy excuse that “we all make mistakes,” wrote that he “is admitting and apologizing for lying about his resume,” while stand-in Fox host Tulsi Gabbard and Democrats “are giving [him] zero grace.” They are even “demanding he resign,” she complained, before laying into Gabbard. “I think we Republicans should give George Santos a chance and see how he legislates and votes, not treat him the same as the left is,” Greene wrote, adding that she hopes he “is sincere.” That message might be confusing for some who read Greene’s op-ed for The Daily Caller last week, where she said “lying to the base is a red line for me.”

[LFC]

The George Santos lying liar lies just keep coming. Apparently his mother died both in 9/11 and in 2016. I can hardly wait for the explanation of why he has two moms or how his mom was the reincarnation of Lazarus ... which, now that I've typed it, seem redundant.

Oh, yeah. He's also apparently now under federal investigation as well as by NY state.